Among the unacceptable faces of modern warfare is the involvement - and sometimes deliberate brutalization - of children.  WTN's CHILDREN OF CONFLICT features four stories showing how children are affected by war and new initiatives to help rehabilitate them.  BOY SOLDIERS examines the war-scarred victims of Mozambique’s 15-year civil war, NEW GAMES FOR THE STONE THROWERS explores how children in the Gaza Strip who once formed the front-line of the Intifada - the Palestinian uprising - are now finally receiving an education.  PLAYING WITH FIRE focuses on the thousands of children who have lost limbs, been blinded or lost their families as a result of landmines, and SARAJEVO SURVIVORS features the work of the International Children’s Institute in Montreal which rehabilitates children from Bosnia and other areas of conflict.

Fifteen years of violent civil war in Mozambique have left a grim legacy - three million refugees, widespread habitat destruction, more than 50,000 elephants slaughtered.  SPOILS OF WAR investigates how the war machines of both sides were financed at the expense of the environment.  Jan Brackenbart, a former South African government official, describes the vital supply line between South Africa and the right-wing Renamo rebels: out went thousands of elephant tusks through South African ports to lucrative ivory markets in the Far East; in came South African weapons to arm the rebels.  With the end of the war, there are plans to revive the tourist industry with a new ‘peace’ park straddling the frontier.  But will it take account of the needs of local people?

Over the past 20 years, four million of the world’s people have been killed by droughts, floods, earthquakes and hurricanes and close to half the population of the planet has suffered some form of disruption to their lives.  LIVING WITH DISASTER casts aside the familiar news headlines of misery and destruction to present the untold story - how relatively inexpensive investment can reap huge rewards; reducing the cost, both in reconstruction and in human suffering.  In drought-prone Zimbabwe, farmers have developed their own methods for coping in the harshly arid conditions; while in the Philippines, the programme looks at ways to prevent a typhoon becoming a full-scale disaster.  Featuring dramatic archive footage, these and other stories from Latin America and Bangladesh demonstrate how local communities can bounce back from the turmoil of natural disasters.

The five vignettes that make up Damien Rea’s film together demonstrate the power of community action in helping people take control of their own lives.  In Costa Rica, the Bribri people have fought a successful battle to win back the ancestral lands wrested from them by Spanish settlers.  On the Japanese island of Ishigaki, the villagers of Shiraho staged a campaign to stop the government building an airport which would destroy their priceless coral reef.  In India, the villagers of Dhanawas have built their own gas generators to provide cheap energy.  And in Hungary, a local group on the outskirts of Budapest have set up a community scheme to monitor, and clean up the heavy metal contamination of the soil that is the legacy of 40 years of unregulated industrial development.

In 1994, Senator Tim Wirth of the US Department of Global Affairs faxed an article from Atlantic Monthly to every US embassy around the world.  The article - The Coming Anarchy by American journalist Robert Kaplan - predicted societal break-down and growing chaos worldwide, and so rattled top United Nations officials that they called a confidential meeting to discuss its implications.  In this BBC Panorama programme, reporter Steve Bradshaw tests Kaplan’s ideas in locations in China, Rio de Janeiro and Sierra Leone which can be seen as laboratories for the future.  But the rich, industrialised world is not immune to chaos either, the film concludes: the social conditions that give rise to civil breakdown in Sierra Leone’s Freetown are also replicating themselves in UK cities like Liverpool.

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